Product use and customer happiness

I just read a great post by David Skok on Managing Customer Success to Reduce Churn. One of the key points I love in his post is that measuring customer engagement does not give you the entire picture of your customer(s)’ happiness with your product, and does not correlate perfectly with expected churn rate. While it’s harder to do, measuring customer outcomes can provide a much better view into how likely a customer is to churn, and how much value/happiness they are getting out of your product.

I noticed this pattern at Boundless quite a bit – a number of our happiest users were minimally engaged with the product. That’s because the product met their needs efficiently in two key areas – price and efficacy. They not only paid less that they thought they would for their learning materials, but they also were able to read and retain their information quickly, without the need to heavily engage with the product. It took a while to figure this out, as we were carefully using analytics to track product usage. And once we saw that happiness and engagement were not highly correlated, but instead outcomes (good grades, efficient studying and the great price point) generated the customer happiness… well, then we were able to double down on the right product features and highlight the best selling points to new potential users.